ExchangeHomesBlog.com

Rogue Home Exchange Club

Over the past couple of weeks, all the major home exchange clubs have been increasingly concerned by reports circulating about a rogue club out of China calling itself AllHomeExchange.com. This disgraceful organization has somehow found the means to infiltrate the security of many of the established home exchange clubs and plagiarized their listing data. As a result, they are blatantly claiming a membership quota in excess of 21,000.

Let me reassure ExchangeHomes.com members that I’m reasonably certain our database has not been stolen. We’ve received zero complaints from members and we’ve carefully searched the AllHomeExchange.com website a number of times for sample listings but none have ever appeared.

Thankfully our programmers have some pretty impenetrable code in place and I’m proud to boast that it seems to be working! However, I know many of our members also belong to other home exchange clubs and these organizations may not have been so fortunate.

If you receive an email from this rogue enterprise inviting you to participate in a “trial membership”—don’t respond to it. By doing so you will merely confirm the validity of your email address; something you definitely don’t want to do! Just go to their website and remove your listing post-haste.

Never respond to unsolicited messages offering free membership to a home exchange service. This current instance of piracy is by far the most blatant and far reaching, but there have been several similar unethical and devious organizations in the past who’ve attempted similar tactics as a perceived means of quickly building a database of members. Ignore them.

If you receive an exchange inquiry from any of their stolen “members” who have been taken in (and unfortunately a few have), inform them immediately that they’ve been scammed and encourage them to contact their own club and report the theft of their listing.

I don’t image that AllHomeExchange.com went to all this trouble simply as a means of helping the home exchange community, so that leaves one other motive—monetary gain. If you’ve provided them with a credit card number, notify your bank IMMEDIATELY and cancel the credit card.

I find it very hard to believe that anyone could perceive this organization as legitimate. They publish absolutely no contact information, their presentation of the English language in their website text is extremely poor, and surely their proclamation of 21,000 listings should wave a HUGE red warning flag.

I know that all the reputable home exchange organizations go to great lengths to protect their members’ security. It’s extremely unfortunate that several have clearly been infiltrated by this insidious organization. The ExchangeHomes.com programmers have an ongoing commission to continually implement any new security methods whenever they become available. They tell me some additional features are already built into our new web site so I believe ExchangeHomes.com will continue to thwart these thieves and spammers.

This entry was posted on Monday, January 14th, 2008 at 5:15 pm and is filed under General Home Exchange Info. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. You can also subscribe to the comments RSS Feed.